C.S. Lewis called the recurring longing central to his spiritual autobiography “Joy.”
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes Joy as an intense, involuntary desire for something beyond ordinary satisfaction. He associated it with moments prompted by nature, music, mythology, poetry, and imaginative literature. The experience was not simply happiness, because it could include restlessness and a painful awareness that the desired object was absent.
Lewis later connected this longing with the German idea of Sehnsucht, although his use of the term was personal and literary rather than a strict technical definition. He argued that the experiences pointed beyond themselves and helped lead him toward Christian belief.
Readers sometimes treat “Joy” as merely a cheerful mood or as a synonym for pleasure. In Lewis’s autobiography, it is more precise: a sudden stab of longing that arrives unexpectedly and disappears when deliberately pursued. It became one of the most recognizable themes in accounts of his conversion and imagination.